PopcornTime Defiantly Pops Back Up After Domain Gets Suspended

The most popular way of accessing the popular "Netflix for torrents" service PopcornTime abruptly went down last week when European regulators suspended the domain registration for Time4Popcorn.eu. In a message today, the anonymous developers behind the service say the service is back.

You can now find PopcornTime at Popcorn-time.se. (You'll recognise that .se in the address as the same Swedish top-level domain that currently lists notorious torrent index, The Pirate Bay.) After the domain was shut down, the PopcornTime's apps stopped working across platforms because as TorrentFreak points out, the apps need the domain to load their UI. But if you download updated versions, they should all work by now. I just tried it out on Mac and it's working.

Despite PopcornTime's defiant statement that it will never be taken down, the devs are surprisingly open about the fact that they need Google juice to survive. They're asking people to update links and to broadly share the new URL, so that their search rank improves and cancels out the old time4popcorn domain.

Google or not, PopcornTime's prompt resurgence seems to confirm the long-held notion that stamping out domains doesn't do much to stop privacy. The team (teams?) working on PopcornTime have been remarkably good at evading throttling ISPs and regulators. The service even has built-in VPN to help users maintain their anonymity. We'll be watching for the regulators' next move. [Popcorn-time.se]